


Ophelia (Triptych)

by Lapsed_Scholar



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Episode: s06e22 Biogenesis, Episode: s07e01 The Sixth Extinction, Episode: s07e02 The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Pre-X-Files Revival, References to Shakespeare, Romance, The X-Files Revival, and also
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-26 01:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17736131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lapsed_Scholar/pseuds/Lapsed_Scholar
Summary: Love, distance, and mental illness





	1. Before

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hard warning for discussion (not depiction) of sexual assault in this chapter.
> 
> Warning throughout for mental illness.

Ophelia:  
O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!  
The courtier’s, scholar’s, soldier’s, eye, tongue, sword.  
Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,  
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,  
Th’ observ’d of all observers—quite, quite down!  
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,  
That suck’d the honey of his music vows,  
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,  
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;  
That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth  
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me  
T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

 _Hamlet_ , III. 1. 132

 

If Dana Scully is being perfectly honest with herself, she will admit that she hardly expected to be the first member of her deeply convoluted partnership to quote Shakespeare about the other. Her realm is hard science and fact: practicality. Though she can appreciate the beauty in literature, she isn’t generally taken with reciting poetry or memorizing reflective quotes. Mulder, on the other hand, went to Oxford, and he memorizes things without really even trying. Surely he knows Shakespeare, and he’s even reflective (or romantic?) enough to use it.

She has envisioned it a time or two—he’d make the quip carelessly, a sort of effortless display of his intellect, and it would be both cheesy and apt (and maybe romantic?), and she would roll her eyes and snort and only give him the barest glimpse of her smile.

But it’s in West Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, trapped on the other side of the world from him, that Scully first has the impulse to express her feelings through poetry. She feels helpless and lost: She’s in Africa because she has no idea what else to do. She hates that she left Mulder alone, but she had realized that, with Fowley and even Skinner— _Skinner_!—insidiously standing guard, she couldn’t save him from his bedside. She might even be barred from his bedside. Côte d’Ivoire had been her only lead, and so she had gone.

She hopes he knows, somewhere in that beautiful mind of his, that she didn’t abandon him, that she’s doing her best for him, even though it’s excruciating.

She writes to him in a journal, as she had done when she had cancer, hoping it will keep her motivated and balm the hurt at their disconnection. As she’s mourning over the loss of his mind, trying to tell herself that she’ll save him (she has to save him), the Shakespeare comes into her head. In high school, she had memorized Ophelia’s lament over the loss of Hamlet’s sanity for extra credit. At the time, she had thought it tragically romantic and poetic and beautiful. Tragic quotes are far less enchanting when they fit into real life; there’s a bitter edge to her recollection. But she writes the quote in her journal, hoping to find some emotional relief.

* * *

“Thank you for coming. He was asking for you last night,” said Diana Fowley.

Skinner was the one who had called Scully back from New Mexico; Mulder himself had dismissed her concern over his wellbeing with irritable impatience, too focused on debating the artifact with her. After receiving the call from Skinner, she had sped back to the airport, flown back to Washington on the next possible flight, had driven directly to the hospital from Dulles, and hurried through the maze of corridors while fighting to control her mounting dread and terror.

All this, only to be neatly intercepted by Fowley, who had materialized and taken an immediate, intimate control of the situation as though she had every right to act as the central partner in his life. As though Fowley were the one who belonged here, as though Scully were doing Fowley an indulgent favor by coming to Mulder when he needed her. As though it were Scully, and not Fowley, who was in the habit of using him and abandoning him at a whim.

Fowley’s presence felt intrusive and more than a little sinister. It rankled, but Scully schooled her face carefully. She couldn’t afford to let her feelings interfere with her mission.

(She remembered, with a cold jolt, both the woman’s voice that answered Mulder’s phone the night before and the wooziness of his own voice.

 _He was asking for you last night_. Oh God.)

Mulder was still asking—begging—for her through the security footage, locked in a cell. She wondered if he could sense her presence, but she wasn’t allowed to find out, or even to see him. Fowley and Skinner pulled her away. They were elegant about it, but she could read the body language, take the temperature of a room. They were going to keep her out, no matter what it took. If she struggled, put up a fight, she would be the one to lose authority with the hospital where he was trapped. She would be labeled an emotional, irrational woman. A jealous creature. Pitiable.

“He said I was the only one who'd believe him—about an artifact,” Fowley was explaining.

It was at this moment, finally ( _finally_ ), that Scully recognized the lie. It was built very carefully, executed with rare mastery, designed to hit her at her most insecure spot, the spot she had been so foolishly bad at concealing. She realized, with sudden, blazing certainty, that Mulder would _never_ say that. Whether he could barely speak or not.

She had finally learned to trust Mulder at the same instant he had finally learned not to trust Fowley.

Her façade cracked. Just a little, but enough. “You’re a liar. You’re both liars.” She included Skinner in the rebuke, was shaken to find the man she had come to rely on as an ally keeping her away from Mulder. The venom in her voice gave away her distress, tipped her hand.

 _I can’t stay here_ , she realized in a moment of terrible clarity. She couldn’t help him from his bedside, as much as she may have wanted to stay beside him and soothe him, hold his hand, stroke his face.

She wasn’t going to simply sit by and watch him die. She wasn’t ready to give up on him yet.

* * *

She doesn’t have all the answers once she gets back from Africa, but she has enough to gain a renewed sense of purpose. She goes to see him—holds his hand and tries to find him in his normally-expressive eyes. But his eyes are blank and flat: If he’s registering anything at all, it’s locked deeply inside of himself. She had insisted to Skinner that Mulder wasn’t dying, but she knows that he will if she can’t figure out how to slow his mind. His brain is too active to function, the synapses firing at such speed and volume that they might as well not be firing at all.

She begs him to hold on.

He’ll tell her later, with a tender sort of inflection and a light caress to her cheek, that he had heard her, beneath everything. That her words and her presence gave him a calm, steady port in the buffeting storm of his mind. Then his voice will take on the odd, quiet sort of tone that means he can’t figure out quite what to think, and he will add, almost as an afterthought, that Diana had looked at him from the same position and told him that she knew all about his condition, that there was no need to prove anything about it, and that it would allow them to finally be together.

It will take a few minutes for the sheer, existential horror of that sentiment to finish unfurling in Scully’s mind. She will remember him as he was then: unable to move or speak, confused and in pain, bereft of free will. Stripped of everything that made him who he was.

Mulder might not know what to make of it, but she absolutely will. It will make her sick.

* * *

She steals quickly through the twisted, eerily empty passageways beneath the Department of Defense. She doesn’t know how much time she has, and she cannot fail. When she finds him, her relief is short-lived. He’s lying in the middle of a makeshift surgery theater, discarded on the gurney, terribly quiet and still.

She moves hurriedly to him. He’s breathing, and his pulse thrums beneath her palm. His eyelids flicker when she touches his face, but he doesn’t open his eyes. He has to get up: She can’t carry him out of here unassisted, and there’s no wheelchair. She can’t save him alone.

“No one can do it but you, Mulder. Mulder, help me. Please, Mulder.”

His eyes flutter open. He looks at her, and he knows her, and he returns to life.

* * *

He doesn’t talk about it much, and she refuses to push him. What’s happened to him is traumatic, she knows, and she watches him closely for signs of how he’s coping, but she doesn’t want to force confidences that he’s not comfortable with. He’d spent the last month with no agency at all, and she refuses to rob him of any more.

He does tell her, with the awed, earnest seriousness that distinguishes his deepest beliefs, that she is the constant in his world and in his head.

* * *

Two weeks after he’s come home, he’s lying on his couch with his bandaged head in her lap, and he startles her by sighing. He looks resigned and maybe even scared, and his expression fills her with foreboding.

“Scully... I—I need to tell you something.” He meets her eyes briefly. She gives him an inquiring look, and his gaze flicks away again to stare distantly at the ceiling, but he continues. “I... when you were in New Mexico... The last thing I can clearly remember... I went to American University to try to dig more into Barnes. But I couldn’t—it just kept getting worse, and when I couldn’t hold out anymore, I just collapsed. Diana brought me home. I don’t know how she knew I was in trouble or where I was... maybe... maybe I called her? I don’t remember.”

She nods. She had surmised this. She’s been worried about this. After she had managed to banish the flash of jealousy, her principal emotion has been a kind of horrified apprehension. ( _“He was asking for you,” Fowley had said._ )

“I... I don’t remember much about that night at all. I remember talking to you. I was in bed. I remember... she came to me afterwards, and I... she kissed me, I remember that. And she wasn’t fully dressed. _I_ wasn’t fully dressed. But I don’t remember anything else—I don’t even remember how I got my clothes off. I... maybe I wasn’t harsh enough, discouraging enough, in my interactions with her—I mean, I still cared about her; I didn’t want to just... but I didn’t mean to leave a door open—to imply... I didn’t mean to lead her on, or, or— I guess maybe I did call her, back at the university? And she figured that meant I wanted... I shouldn’t have...” He breaks off, looking confused and stricken. Then he closes his eyes, sighs, and forces out, in a very quiet rush, “Scully, I have no idea what I did or what happened, and I’m sorry.”

She’s not surprised that he’s sorry, nor that he blames himself. But she does regret it. She regrets more that he might take her own earlier suspicions and their resulting fight to imply that she would blame him for _this_. She’d never wanted this for him: the hollow duplicity of yet another person who he thought cared for him. She wishes she had been wrong about Diana Fowley.

She truly had needed Fowley’s help to save him, so she’s glad that she had only uncomfortable misgivings, rather than the memory of this conversation, when she had to ask for it. It would have been far harder to conceal her disdain and wrath.

Back in her undergraduate days, Dana Scully had volunteered at a rape crisis center. And although some of her mentors then had been insistent on viewing sexual crime through a purely [second-wave] feminist lens—it’s a crime of systemic power against women, and thus cannot be committed against men—she can easily recognize the parallels: confusion, pain, self-doubt and self-blame. It hurts her heart. She summons as much self-mastery as she can, tries to slip back into the calm, soothing manner imparted to her during a forty hour training.

“Mulder...” She cups his cheek and tips his head toward her. His eyes come open again, and she searches them. “Mulder, that wasn’t your fault. _Whatever_ happened. You need to know that. The only thing I care about in that scenario is _you_.”

He gives her a dubious look, but the disbelief and lingering guilt are now mixed with relief and devotion, and she’ll take that for now. He closes his eyes again and sighs and buries his face in her stomach.

She wonders if this is even a violation that stands out to him, or if, once he’s confessed to her what clearly feels to him like some sort of infidelity, the hurt and guilt from it will wash into the hurt from everything else that happened to him. Kidnapped, subjected to involuntary brain surgery, and left to die as though he were a discarded husk which no longer held any value. She wonders if the ache of betrayal is more severe from Diana or from his mother. His mother who had belatedly come to see him in his painful illness only to give him over to the very man who wanted to destroy him.

She’s disturbed by how resigned he seems to all of it. He’s hurt, but he isn’t angry. This, apparently, is how he more or less expects to be treated by the people who should care about him, who claim to love him. She’s furious—livid—on his behalf, but the man who protests so loudly at the injustice inflicted on others doesn’t seem to spare the same degree of compassion for himself.

She holds him a little tighter, where he’s curled in her lap, hopes that maybe surrounding him with her love will cause some of it to sink into him. He is _hers_ now, and she intends to protect him.

* * *

She suggests he talk to a counselor, at least for awhile. He surprises her by agreeing. She had expected to have to convince him. She remembers, then, something she read in his medical record, but hadn’t pried about. Dating back to the end of her cancer, to their first encounter with Michael Kritschgau.

He had taken SSRIs for a period, coinciding with her remission. The notes that accompanied the prescription were “suicidal ideation.”

She turns it over in her mind. She thinks she had always known, in the back of her mind, that the reason why their flimsy lie about his suicide had held up for as long as it did was simply that no one had been surprised to hear that Fox Mulder had blown his brains out.

If he hadn’t made it to her apartment first, if she hadn't been expecting the police to call her to identify his body, what would she have felt during that phone call? Hurt, pierced, bereft, devastated. But surely not surprised.

She thinks further back, wonders how much conviction he had truly held that the holes drilled into his skull in Rhode Island would help him remember. If, on some level, he had wanted to die, had been desperate enough to accept a negative outcome with a positive one, had only resorted to calling her when he was afraid he had hurt someone else.

She reflects on what she knows of him, and it bothers her. The possibility that he has now decided to care for himself simply because she loves him, that his own self-worth is tangled up in his love for her, that he is worthwhile because she thinks he is. (She will never stop believing this for him, but borrowed convictions are more fragile than intrinsic ones.)

That the stay on her death sentence was the only thing that had staid his.

 _But it didn’t turn out that way,_ she thinks firmly and banishes those darker thoughts from her head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Now we can finally be together,” says Diana Fowley to her catatonic ex who has, in every previous instance, gently rejected her overtures toward romantic renewal.
> 
> It’s honestly that scene that makes me judge her the most harshly.
> 
> The conversation and awareness that we now have around consent wasn’t widespread in the late ’90s. Given the period and the fact that he’s a man, Mulder isn’t likely to consider what happened to him sexual assault, however uncomfortable or violated it might make him feel. Scully might even be unlikely to have quite the clear-eyed view I gave her, but it seemed at least plausible that she would be aware of the issues surrounding sexual violence, and I really couldn’t write this without giving someone the voice of moral clarity.


	2. During

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hard warning for depictions of mental illness

Macbeth:  
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,  
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,  
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,  
And with some sweet oblivious antidote  
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff  
Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:  
Therein the patient  
Must minister to himself.

Macbeth:  
Throw physic to the dogs, I’ll none of it.

 _Macbeth_ , V.1.42-49

 

The beginning of 2013 is busy for Scully at work. She has surgeries and consultations: She’s so busy that she even stays a few nights in a hotel room so she doesn’t have to make the long commute to rural Virginia. When she tells Mulder, he doesn’t argue—he doesn’t even really comment—but he’s been so... preoccupied these days.

He’s been preoccupied since the middle of 2012. She’d been irritated at him, at his nervous energy leading into what he still feared to be the end of the world. She had tried to talk him out of it ( _“Mulder, those men are long dead.”_ ), but he had persisted, tried to find connections, spent all his time frantically, obsessively searching. She had been relieved when the end of the world hadn’t come (both for the sake of the world and for the sake of her partner), and fervently hoped that he would return to normal.

But he hadn’t. She had been annoyed at first, thought his mood was a funk she could tease him out of. ( _“Only you would find the world not ending to be something bad, Mulder.”_ ) Then she had gotten angry and fumed to herself—Why did he want more suffering to befall them? Hadn’t he had enough suffering?!

It takes her until the middle of 2013 to consciously admit just how bad he’s gotten, or to acknowledge just how long it’s been since he’d actually _been_ normal.

This has been a problem since long before 2012.

* * *

If she’s truthful, looking back, she has to acknowledge that he had never really recovered from the events of 2000-2001. From his abduction and ordeal and death. (She doesn’t like to look back: It’s so painful to her that she’d honestly rather just avoid it. And maybe that’s been part of the problem.) He had started to heal... and then she had forced him to leave again, and then they’d lost their son, and then they’d been fugitives. It’s hard to keep up CBT when you’re a fugitive. She had tried to keep getting the SSRIs for him, but he’d eventually stopped her—stopped taking them. And, really, he had seemed OK for awhile. There were scars across his psyche (there were scars across hers, but his were thicker, keloidal), but he had mostly healed. His sense of humor was more acerbic, his brilliance quieter and less voluble, but he was still the same man. And she thinks he’d been content enough, though isolated and reclusive.

But. There have been signs. Signs that he hasn’t been quite as healthy as he wants to appear, signs that he’s been struggling for awhile now. Signs that, in her deep desire for everything to finally be OK, she’s ignored.

He’s been tired at times, listless. He’s gradually lost interest in things that used to fascinate him. His sleeping schedule has grown erratic again, and he’s prone to intense obsession over minutia. He’s been drinking more. Before, he had been mostly a light social drinker, with very rare jags of drinking heavily with purpose—and those jags were serious enough to have concerned her if he had done them with any sort of regularity. For the past few years, though, he has been drinking more regularly, seemingly casually. She hasn’t seen him get frighteningly drunk. But she wonders now if he’s been drinking more than she ever thought, hiding most of it while she’s at work. If he’s using alcohol to soothe or escape mental pain.

He’s never really re-integrated into life outside their house, she notices now. After their pardon, he had come occasionally to see her at work, it’s true. He had shaved, looked more like himself for awhile. But his natural tendency toward being alone had solidified during his necessary exile. And now, even though he no longer has to be so isolated, he rarely ventures very far from the house.

He hasn’t managed to regain a sense of purpose or drive outside of, apparently, preparing for an apocalypse that never came. Mulder has always been prone to guilt and obsession, but he used to manage it by driving forward, pressing toward a goal, devoting himself to a larger good. (In his better years, he had even managed to balance his drive and commitment with consideration of his own well-being.)

She had begged him not to chase monsters in the dark again, and so he hadn’t.

She’s somehow managed to overlook the isolation and the purposelessness until now. With all the very real external dangers that had plagued them for so long, she had somehow forgotten how susceptible he is to mental self-destruction. She’s been so relieved to have him physically safe, to not have to worry about being discovered and having him taken away and murdered, that she had let her vigilance get lax.

But now... now. She comes home from work, and he’s not waiting for her. He hasn’t made dinner; he’s not ready with a fantastic story that he either read or made up. He’s stuck in his office where he’s been for the last three days.

* * *

However he’s gotten to this point, it becomes increasingly clear that he doesn’t have the mental resilience (or even the desire) to pull out of it. He hates himself these days. With the intense, focused, violent passion he used to throw into avenging wrongs or finding truths or loving her. 

“This is all my fault. _All_ of it. Everything we’ve been through. Everything _you’ve_ been through.”

She’s never believed this. And even though he’s always had _something_ of a guilt complex, she never used to think that he seriously believed it either. (God, she _hopes_ he didn’t believe it.) It’s painful to witness him so despise and savage something she holds to be so precious. (But, then, he never really has given much consideration to how his self-destruction hurts the people who love him.)

She remembers again the mental health history in his medical record. _Suicidal ideation_. He hadn’t talked to her about it, and after her remission they had both taken some space. But she is willing to bet that the themes were familiar. Her cancer had been his fault, and he was a contemptible fool, and everything was for nothing.

But where her remission had apparently inspired him to get help, he has no such motivation now. He rejects therapy out-of-hand ( _“How the hell could anyone possibly understand any of what I’d have to say?”_ ), and he refuses to consider medication again. He’s convinced he’s finally seeing himself clearly, and this is what he deserves.

He searches more obsessively and more ineffectively than he ever did. He sits at the computer and pores over disjointed, flimsy conspiracy theories. Maybe he thinks that if he stumbles upon the right theory, finds out the truth (the real Truth, not just one of the many iterations of the many truths there are), he’ll be able to forgive himself. He’s chasing his own vindication, growing increasingly desperate, grasping at straws. (Whatever he finds, it won’t help him. He’s searching for the wrong thing.

She’s never thought he needed vindication.)

She realizes, with mounting horror and a cruel sense of déjà vu, that he is slowly dying before her, and she has no idea how to stop it. His beautiful mind is once again tearing itself apart.

She remembers Diana Fowley. Diana, who loved him (or claimed to), but conditionally, only as she wanted him to be, not as he was. Who viewed his imprisonment in his own mind as a way to finally keep him with her. He’s imprisoned once again in his own mind, and Scully knows it’s not a blessing, and she would never touch him without his consent.

But. She so wanted to keep him safe with her, in their house and away from the darkness. She wonders if there’s a parallel, and she hates herself for wondering.

* * *

In truth, Mulder has never quite been able to stand steadily on his own—has never really learned to value himself for his own sake. He was a son and a brother; an agent and a profiler; a crusader; a partner, a friend, a lover, and (very briefly) a father. The man who bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things has never managed to love himself, never been able to find his own inherent value.

She has always found him beautiful. Not necessarily physically. (Although, yes, he is very good-looking, and her first thought when she saw him, fresh off of Jack Willis and swearing up and down that she’d never again date her colleague was, “ _You have_ got _to be kidding me._ ”) He is uncommon brilliance and wonder and tenacity and compassion all rolled up together.

She wonders if he considers the depth of her love for him to be a strength or a weakness. She wonders if he finds her love contemptible.

She’s not a saint, and she can’t heal him with a touch. The strength of her convictions won’t save him. He has to find his own.

_“No one can do it but you, Mulder. Mulder, help me. Please, Mulder.”_

She can stay and hold him while he dies in front of her. Or—

Or—

After all these years, her mind still alights on Diana Fowley and the choice that she would’ve made.

It infuriates her.

* * *

He won’t look into her eyes most of the time. He knows she can read them. When he does, the violence of his self-loathing scares her. Later, most of the life drains out of them altogether. They are flat, emotionless. She remembers their beauty and depth, sparking wit and limitless wonder, deep compassion and deeper love.

Sometimes she thinks she can see the love, still. Stirring faintly, as if covered by a thick blanket of snow. Or six feet of dirt. She tries not to cry, and he doesn’t notice.

* * *

He sits alone in his office, door closed and blinds closed, in the dark. She wanders by, pushes open the door. He’s staring obsessively at something, neck craned forward, eyes locked. He looks terrible. It’s been several days since he’s showered, and two since he’s eaten. The weight loss is starting to become visible.

She’s not sure if he registers that she’s there. He murmurs, “After what I’ve seen...”

The words trigger her memory, the same, stupid monologue from high school. Why is she fated to watch his mind unravel? She’s speaking before she’s consciously aware of it. She can’t quite keep the bitterness from her tone. “Oh woe is me to have seen what I have seen; see what I see.”

She wonders if he’ll recognize the quote and be angry. (The last of the fight left in him seems to be directed at resisting her attempts to get him better.) Between Oxford and the formidable memory, he would surely know Shakespeare, especially a recognizable quote like that.

He doesn’t even look at her. If he’s even heard her, he recognizes nothing.

* * *

“I can’t stay here, Mulder,” she says one night, in a moment of terrible clarity. He’s engrossed in something on his computer, which is about the only thing he can focus on anymore. “It will kill us both.”

He says nothing, but he does turn to look at her. His eyes are still mostly-dead, but she thinks she sees a weary, unsurprised resignation that cuts her more deeply than she had ever imagined he could hurt her.

But this she is now sure of: If she stays, it will be to sit by his side and watch him die. She’s not ready to give up on him yet.

* * *

She debates for a long, long time about whether he will be safer if she takes all the guns with her or leaves one. They both have dangerous enemies. But at this point, self-harm seems more likely to her than self-defense. 

She takes the guns.

* * *

She watches him, watching her as she packs. His eyes are blank, vacant. He’s silent and unmoving. He won’t fight her now. He’s completely given up, almost an empty shell. She thinks that makes it worse.

She kisses his temple before she leaves. He doesn’t move.

She tries not to cry going out the door. She feels relief and remorse in equal measure, and she’s still desperately worried. What if he just gets worse, and she’s abandoning him to die alone? She thinks of a saying her mother always used when punishing her children. “I must be cruel only to be kind.” She mumbles it to herself on the threshold, a mantra of strength, before pushing the door open and not looking back.

It’s hours later before he finishes the quotation for her, still lying on the sofa where she had left him. “Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.”


	3. After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're paying really close attention, you might notice that chapter 1 has a new section, which was a result of editing chapter 3. (I try not to do that, but... it really didn't work in chapter 3.)

O! never say that I was false of heart,  
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.  
As easy might I from myself depart  
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie:  
That is my home of love; if I have ranged,  
Like him that travels, I return again,  
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,  
So that myself bring water for my stain.  
Never believe, though in my nature reigned  
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,  
That it could so preposterously be stained,  
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good;  
For nothing in this wide universe I call,  
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.

Sonnet CIX

 

He’s doing better. This is the principal thought in her mind, even as he’s apparently letting mysterious figures drag him around by the nose again. (Why can’t they ever find someone else to fuck with? But she knows, of course. It’s because if you’re unheard and unbelieved and dismissed, no one will give you a fairer hearing than Fox Mulder. She loves him for this, even as she hates what it sometimes does to him.)

She’s immensely irritated and incredibly relieved all at once, and the bittersweet feeling of it threatens to undo her. She argues with him, and she’s frustrated with him, but it’s all so familiar that she can’t help feeling a small stab of joy that is entirely inappropriate to the situation.

And, of course, she always did want answers, for herself, for Mulder, for their son (for her daughter, for her sister and his sister). If they’re both being manipulated, the manipulators found her weak point, too.

In the end, she agrees to work with him again with barely a second thought.

* * *

Just how much better he’s doing becomes apparent over the next few months. He’s put on weight and muscle mass, lost the gaunt, starved look. He’s apparently been running again, too, since he manages to chase suspects with most of the speed of his younger years. He runs down one thirty-year-old suspect and gets into a messy physical altercation. He does manage to get the cuffs on. 

Scully patches him up, making a small noise of disapproval at the gash on his head. “Stop running off by yourself, Mulder. You need to wait for backup.”

“Hey, I got him, didn’t I?”

She gives him a cool look, meant to remind him of the battered condition of his face, but there’s a fondness in it that she can’t get rid of. She does not need to encourage his bad habits simply because they are so characteristically his. “Yeah. You certainly did.” She swipes at the cut, trying to imbue the gesture with judgment of his disregard for procedure.

“Well, you should see the other guy.”

“I did. I hate to tell you this, Mulder, but he looks substantially better than you.”

“Ouch, Doc. ‘His hands than mine are quicker for a fray, my legs are longer, though, to run away.’” She raises her eyebrow at him, so he adds. “ _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. Well, almost.”

He keeps quoting Shakespeare to her, enough for her to _know_ he’s doing it on purpose, assigning some meaning to it, but she’s not sure she’s decided what that meaning is yet. They’ve always been good at this, the oblique communication of deeper truths, but sometimes she wishes she had set an early and uncharacteristic precedent that they were direct with each other about their feelings.

“Maybe you wouldn’t end up so bloodied if you actually _did_ run away from danger for once instead of headlong into it. Now stop squirming,” she grabs his head and holds it still.

“I think this hurts more than it used to,” Mulder winces.

* * *

He’s more and more like himself in their conversations, too, and it’s this that eventually gets her into trouble. They’ve been arguing all day, in the tetchy, irritated, charged way that they used to. Both of them are positive that they’re right, but respect the opinion of the other too much to simply dismiss their opponent as a lost cause. So they’re going in circles, trying to convince each other and explain themselves.

He’s also driven her home, even though she told him that she could take the train, and she suspects that he just wanted the extra time to extend the argument. And so now they’re sitting outside her building, rehashing the same points. He’s a little off his game—he usually has considerably more backing examples to throw at her, but if this were a dance, he’d only have missed a few steps.

It’s absolutely maddening, and she remembers with sudden vividness how she used to wonder if he would shut up for _just a moment_ if she seized him by the tie and occupied his mouth with hers. (She’d learned later that he absolutely would. His silence is short-lived unless she keeps his mouth occupied, but at least he usually stops talking about monsters.)

Seizing him by the tie is probably too forward for the moment, but she is pierced with powerful nostalgia and longing, and before she can think too much about it, and even though it is only Tuesday and probably not the day to (re)start something, she interrupts his impassioned defense of the role of witchcraft in their latest case and says, “Come up with me.”

She doesn’t touch him, but he inhales sharply and flinches as if she had, and she sees panic spark in his eyes before he hurriedly looks away from her and stares out the windshield. “Scully... I—I can’t.”

Icy reality grips her. What, exactly, had she been thinking, and what on earth possessed her to let those thoughts leave her mouth? “I, um, of course, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have overstepped like that,” she hurries to say before scrambling quickly out of the car.

“Hold on—wait...” he starts, but he reacts a bit slower than he used to, pinching the bridge of his nose, and she’s already bolted away before she can hear him.

* * *

The rest of the week is a bit awkward and strained, but their professional partnership is even older than their friendship, and both have always been incredibly durable.

Scully is grateful that their case heats up enough to require their focus and footwork. Doing a few more exhumations and autopsies effectively separates them and provides her with a solid fallback for conversation. She’s not sure that she would have survived close-quarters paperwork. She knows that she’s been quieter than normal, but she hopes that she has masked her mortification and self-reproach fairly well.

By midday on Friday, they’ve solved the case. Witchcraft had absolutely nothing to do with anything, but Scully doesn’t gloat very much, which she knows that Mulder definitely notices. He’s been shooting her thoughtful looks for the past few days, as though he’s trying to puzzle her out, but he hasn’t decided to say anything, for which she is grateful.

Friday afternoon finds them sitting alone in the basement, writing up the case in the quiet companionship that ought to be familiar to her by now. But by four-fifteen, her nerves are fairly shot. She stands up, muttering something about not feeling well, and finishing her case report at home, and see you on Monday. Mulder looks up from his typing, gives her a searching look, but she hurries to the door and is out before he can even say anything.

She knows that she’s just behaved uncharacteristically, and, given that, it would be uncharacteristic of Mulder not to try to find her to check on her. She doesn’t really know where she’s going, but she avoids her apartment as the place he’d likely check first. But, of course, she can’t actually expect to hide from him. He knows her too well; he’s incredibly tenacious; and the one thing even the FBI could never discount was that Fox Mulder was (and still is) an exceptionally gifted investigator.

It has delighted her to see him work again, to work with him again. He once again resembles the man she has loved for so many years. _You should’ve told him to go back a long time ago,_ her own mind taunts her. _You should’ve stayed with him to see him through the bad times—no wonder he doesn’t want anything to do with you now that he’s doing better._ She knows it’s false; she knows that she left because it had been the only thing to do, as excruciating as it had been. She even knows that he still cares about her—in some capacity, anyway.

_He also still cared about Diana Fowley, even after all the ways she betrayed and violated him._   _It certainly didn’t mean that he loved her in the way that he once had, although it took you a stupidly long time to realize that._ The fact that this is substantially true doesn’t help. Mulder is a remarkably forgiving man when it comes to mortifications against himself—probably has to be, given his life. She doesn’t actually think she’d betrayed him at all (she _doesn’t_ ), would never use him (she _wouldn’t_ ), hates that her mind tries to compare her to Fowley. She’s still afraid that he might.

_You fled._ _You got overwhelmingly scared of the one good thing left to your life, and you gave up; you fled. Just like you gave up your son._ And she knows this isn’t true, she _knows_ it, and she tries to argue back. But there are times when it _feels_ true, and sometimes feeling saps the conviction from knowing.

She has never stopped loving him. Never. She hopes he knows that, at least.

He finds her (of course he does) at a quarter after five. She’s sure it hasn’t taken him this long to locate her on a bench in front of the reflecting pool. He’s let her have some time in solitude, which is something he never would have done in their younger years. Perhaps wisdom does come with age.

He sits next to her silently, not touching her, evidently letting her have a bit more time. She tries hard not to cry—she’s been trying not to cry for the past forty-five minutes, but crying now would be worse.

When he finally does speak, his voice is quiet and gentle, and his words are nothing at all like what she was expecting to hear. “Oh, Scully. My skeptic. ‘Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.’”

She inhales sharply, and she’s positive her eyes are huge when she turns to look at him, and she fervently hopes that they don’t look as teary as they feel. He’s looking at her softly, and he gives her a small, self-deprecating smile when she meets his eyes. “Those aren’t my words—they’re Shakespeare. That’s Hamlet to Ophelia. Before, you know, he loses his mind and destroys them both. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Shakespeare. Of course, I also forgot that I enjoyed much of anything, really.”

She does cry now, in earnest, and hazily thinks that she should have cried earlier when she was alone and gotten it out of her system. The meaning behind all the Shakespeare quotations slips into focus. She remembers quoting _Hamlet_ at him shortly before she left, mirroring Ophelia’s despair at the loss of a beautiful and beloved mind. He hadn’t responded at the time—she didn’t even know if he had heard her. But he had heard and understood, and he remembers, and he loves her, and he’s letting her know all of these things by quoting from memory. And it’s all just so _like_ him that she cries even harder and hides her face behind her hands.

Whatever he’s been expecting her reaction to be, it apparently wasn’t this dramatic because now it’s his turn to inhale sharply. He does put his arms around her, a bit tentatively at first, but when she turns her face into his chest and clutches at the fabric of his shirt, he pulls her tightly against him, strokes her hair with one hand.

They stay like that for a long, long time, and she can feel a few of his tears drop into her hair. He’s not sobbing like she is, though. He’s going to be wearing most of her makeup on his shirt along with her tears, and she would be feeling mortified about that if she weren’t currently beyond embarrassment.

After they’ve both finished crying and have been sitting quietly for a length of time she’s in no frame of mind to quantify, she mumbles into his shirt, “Mulder?”

“Hmm?”

"The sun _doesn't_ move, at least not relative to the Earth."

Pressed as tightly to him as she is, his startled, delighted laugh is a full-body experience, and she thinks that maybe it was worth all the pain, to hear and feel him laugh like this again.

He moves his chin from the top of her head and gently tilts her face up to look into his. She lets herself study his eyes—really study them. They’re not empty anymore. They’re the same as she remembers, and they hold the same deep love that she’s seen in them for more than twenty years.

When he speaks, his voice is soft, if a bit ragged. “Dana—I _am_ doing better than I was. A lot better. I’m remembering what it feels like to be myself, and I feel a lot more like myself than I have for a very long time now. But I’m still sick. I’ll likely _be_ sick for at least the near future. I have good days and bad days. I can’t always be as much your partner as I used to be or I’d like to be. But I _am_ trying. When you asked me to come home with you... it’s not that I didn’t want to. I wanted to very much. But that day... I knew I couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been good for me or fair to you, and some days are going to be like that, at least for awhile. But it will never, _never_ have anything to do with how I feel about you. None of this does, and it never has.

“And, you know—you _must_ know—you’re the only person who’s ever... cared what happened to me. More than you’ve ever cared about what I could give you, or even who we are together. And you’re willing to fight anyone for me. Including myself. And... I won’t lie; I often don’t like it, and I know that I haven’t always taken it in good grace. But I trust you, Scully. I have _always_ remembered that, even when I couldn’t remember anything else.” A beat. “I understand why you left. It doesn’t always feel like it; sometimes the dark thoughts get in the way still, but I do know why, and I do understand. And you were right. You saved me. Again.”

She blinks at him, and a few more tears leak out. He wipes them away with his thumbs.

Her own voice wavers a bit, but she is proud that it sounds mostly normal, if quiet. “What about tonight?” She suddenly feels bashful and absurdly forward and exposed when he’s looking at her like that, and she hastens to add, “I mean, um, we should probably talk more and not on a public bench.” Now she’s making it sound too distant and impersonal, so she forges on, “And, well, I’ve missed you, but I don’t want to make you uncomfortable or push you into something or...” She trails off when she realizes that he’s smiling at her and doesn’t look uncomfortable at all. She wishes she weren’t still quite so self-conscious about her feelings. She wonders if she’ll be able to ask him to please hold her all night, or if that’s too much for her to say or for him to do.

“Tonight is good.” He kisses her forehead tenderly, a gesture that makes her ache with familiarity. She stands up and, taking his hand, pulls him to his feet. He smiles down at her affectionately, and she thinks she may very well be able to ask him to hold her after all.

“Mulder, you aren’t actually Hamlet, you know.”

“And you aren’t Ophelia, either. And that’s a very good thing, too, considering how that play ended, wouldn’t you say?”

She’s still not quite sure how their story will end (hopefully a long while from now, together, and peacefully in their sleep), but she’s once again looking forward to watching it unfold.

**Author's Note:**

> For the literarily intrepid, you might notice that the epigraph in the first chapter belongs to Scully, the second belongs to Mulder, and the third belongs to either and/or both.
> 
> Before I reigned in the thematic scope, the second was Emily Dickinson ("The first Day's Night had come") and the third was John Donne ("Sweetest love, I do not go"). I recommend both as excellent reading if you're in a particularly poetic mood.


End file.
